As a first step, I encouraged you to reflect on your beliefs in the afterlife. This was a great starting point for my husband and I and I hope you took the time to do this.

It alleviated so much of our fears and made us understand that our fears of our daughter dying were actually related to failure and judgement, rather than what would ultimately happen to our daughter.

In this post, I am going to talk about fear of failure. And I’m going to do so in the context of SIDS.

Current Belief Structure

When we look at the natural order of things, we believe that everyone is supposed to live a long life and die of old age. That’s the ideal scenario.

Parents are supposed to outlive their children and if the child dies before the parent that means something has gone horribly wrong.

We also believe that our job as parents is to protect children and keep them safe. If we don’t do this and our child is injured or in a worst case scenario dies then we have done something wrong as parents.

If our child dies, we have failed at our job as parents to keep our child safe.

Now, I have not experienced the death of a child (and I hope that never happens) so I’m talking about this failure as a worry about something that may or may not happen in the future.

For me, when I think about the decisions I’m making as I’m taking care of Hailey, I don’t want to be riddled with an insecure feeling that I may be significantly messing up her life. I don’t want to be constantly second guessing myself.

1) Trust that some things are just meant to be – I don’t believe that everything in life is predetermined and set in stone. But I do believe that we are meant to have a range of experiences during this lifetime.

I have seen examples where parents do everything right and their child dies. And I have also seen examples where the parents a scattered disaster and their child thrives. There’s no logical explanation.

We can’t control every circumstance and foresee every outcome to every possibly scenario. Quite frankly, we’re not that smart.

So rather than worry about every detail, I have found that trusting that some things are just meant to be is much easier. This includes trusting that my child may be meant to have a short life and also trusting that should that occur, then I will be able to handle it.

This is not saying that it wouldn’t be difficult or devastating. This means that I believe there would ultimately be a light at the end of the tunnel.

2) Everyone has a purpose in life – Everyone has something that we’re meant to accomplish during this lifetime and if we accomplish what we need to then we die. Mission accomplished. If we still have unfinished business then we continue on our journey.

I believe this regardless of age. If a newborn baby dies then they got what they needed from this lifetime. We don’t need to understand what it is.

This is not to say that if my child dies I’d chalk it up as a win. But if I helped them accomplish what they needed to during this life then that is a far cry from failure.

Something to think about.

3) You can’t get it wrong – There’s no such thing as the wrong answer. This is applicable to every decision. This is a completely different way of approaching choices.

Typically we view any choice as having a right and a wrong answer and the pressure is on for us to make the correct decision.

However, what if the “wrong” decision was exactly what we needed to further clarify what we actually want? What if it gave us the exact lesson we needed to learn in order to make a better decision the next time?

Each time we make a “wrong” decision we learn something new. And if we don’t then another opportunity will present itself to teach that lesson to us.

Wrong decisions, in this case, are simply a way to make us better.

So there you have it. Those are 3 beliefs that I’ve adopted that have really helped me reduce my fear of failure. I hope they give you something to think about.

What beliefs or strategies have helped you reduce your fear of failure? Post your answers in the comments section below.